US Downplays Russian Flyover in Black Sea

WASHINGTON — The US military released a video Monday of a Russian Su-24 bomber flying past an American warship in the Black Sea to dispel what it called inaccurate media reports about a routine encounter.

In the video, a Su-24 aircraft appears in the distance, then zooms by the USS Ross — a guided-missile destroyer.

Other Russian bombers also flew within sight of the ship, officials said.

Such footage is rarely released publicly but the US Navy decided to post it “because we were unsatisfied with the press reporting, and we wanted to show exactly what happened,” Pentagon spokesman Col. Steven Warren told reporters.

None of the Russian aircraft that flew by the ship were armed and neither side took any aggressive action, Warren said.

“This was simply a ship and a plane passing in the day in this case,” he said.

Some Russian media had suggested that the aircraft forced the American destroyer to shift course away from Russian territorial waters off the coast of Crimea.

But the Pentagon said those reports were “erroneous” and “didn’t reflect the facts.”